Merging with machines on a biological level would be the holy grail. Mind reading for instance is no longer a thing for mystic Meg to make money off some Rube, but becoming a reality. Brain-machine interfaces are here, a bit rudimentary but they will become better.
Speaking of becoming better, what happens when our machines become better than us and will we be able to upload a consciousness into a computer. Tricky, I would say as we, the cogito ergo sum is chemical but I can imagine a simulated Slammer in the future.
In the novel ‘The Broken God’, people uploaded their brains into a computer (it was a one-way process that destroyed their brain) and the first one that did so became a ‘god’.
One book I read ages ago was that when consciousness was uploaded to spacetime it was found that not only was intergalactic travel possible but it could be done in time as well and in the end they were able to upload everybody who has ever lived including the potential consciousness of aborted fetuses.
Then, of course there is the Altered carbon series.
This is seriously funny.
Last February there were news about a scam where a company man was manipulated via videocalls to make a 25 million USD payment to scammers. The trick was creating video feeds (image and audio) of company management giving the order to pay by using AI.
Last May the company was named: Arup, architecture and engineering company with HQ in London. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/16/tech/arup-deepfake-scam-loss-hong-kong-intl-hnk/index.html
Fast forward to June and Zoom CEO wants to normalize that employees interact with an AI version of management. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan wants AI clones in meetings - The Verge
The irony here is that AI will allow management to make copies of themselves, and demand more attention from the people working for customers…thus hours are spend interacting with the AI version of version of manager.
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One of those surprising research results: we’re smarter than previously thought 
It seems the much-touted AI deepfake voices only have the potential to deceive people, but there’s still something inside us that says Nope, fake!
The researchers first used psychoacoustical methods to test how well human voice identity is preserved in deepfake voices. To do this, they recorded the voices of four male speakers and then used a conversion algorithm to generate deepfake voices. In the main experiment, 25 participants listened to multiple voices and were asked to decide whether or not the identities of two voices were the same. Participants either had to match the identity of two natural voices, or of one natural and one deepfake voice.
The deepfakes were correctly identified in two thirds of cases. “This illustrates that current deepfake voices might not perfectly mimic an identity, but do have the potential to deceive people,” says Claudia Roswandowitz, first author and a postdoc at the Department of Computational Linguistics.
https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2024/Deepfake-Stimme.html
Well, the deepfakes they used were pretty crappy so no surprise there. There are only a handful of TTS models which are realistic.
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Ha, that’s the speed of science 
Article published in 2024, you made me read the methods. 2018 was long ago. So, this may explain the crappiness of synthetic voices.
To synthesize deepfake voices, we used the open-source voice conversion (VC) software SPROCKET, which revealed the second-best sound quality scores for same-speaker pairs and the sixth-best quality for speaker similarity rating among 23 conversion systems submitted to the VC challenge in 2018 and requires relatively little training data (around 10 minutes of speech samples).
A week is a long time in AI. Years are practically irrelevant.
Take a look at ElevenLabs:
Or the recent ChatGPT 4o demos:
The voices that were used in your like were closer to Dr. Sbaitso than the above 
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I’ve been using ChatGPT 4o for a couple of months and have found it very handy for what I do. I can upload different scientific publications or reports and ask it to summarise the differences between them. It can produce nice classifications of different drug types characterised by mode of action, chemical structure etc… or write me a review article based on current research.
Sometimes I will do a brain dump and ask it to help me structure that into a slide presentation, which it does very well. I see it as a great assistant, releasing time to do the kind of creative stuff that I’m paid for.
Is it worth $20 a month, yes probably.
More like: “Are you worth more than $20 a month?”
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Mammal animals are already born with brains that don’t expand that much later, but somehow it doesn’t help them 
I remember reading somewhere that a phone voicemail was a good deterrent for telemarketers.
I’m too lazy and stupid, but I would pay for an app (not a cloud based) that would answer my calls and only patch through the legit ones
A dead giveaway is when you answer and there is silence before someone comes on 3 secs later (usually in a noisy enviroment). I used to offer the courtesy of a ‘Hello’ and ‘No thanks’ but now I just hang up and block the number.
It could actually be my insurer or Swiss Lotto calling… Oh Well
I created a phone firewall like that in the past. If the number was not recognised, a modem picked up the call and played a message “Press 123 to continue” and would wait for the correct DTMF tones to play before ringing the real phone.
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AI puts call centre workers into the matrix:
Angry customer voices are modified by AI to make them less angry.
It’s in Japanese as it was created by SoftBank.
What does it mean? That the call centre worker has lower stress levels because the upset customer voice has been modified?
Exactly, it is a measure designed to protect workers from customer aggression.
In an ideal world, the AI would be used to analyze the voice, cut the call when the customer goes mad, and block further calls until customer calms down.
Or is handed over to an AI ‘manager’ to calm them down.
Swiss Film director’s Premier in London is cancelled following complaints that he used A.I. to write it.
According to Luisi, this is an experiment. The story “is intended to spark a discussion and never had a commercial goal”.
Then he won’t mind that it was cancelled as that is certainly one result for his experiment.